Vettel drives a calculated race
It is said that champions make their own luck. The Bahrain GP turned out to be an overtaking playground for all twenty-two drivers and there were quite a few on the track on Sunday who carved their own luck. First among equals was triple-champion Sebastian Vettel. He overcame a poor start to jump both pole-sitter Nico Rosberg and championship rival Fernando Alonso, going on to leading the race before the first round of pit-stops. Behind him, everyone else was busy making their own strategies work and it played out in Vettel’s hands who simply maintained a calculated pace to win the race.

Among the best of the rest were the two Lotus drivers; Kimi Raikkonen has been very consistent since his comeback, and a year ago narrowly missed out winning the race in Bahrain. This time around he wasn’t as close to Vettel but could have been if Lotus had shown a little more pace during qualifying on Saturday. His team-mate Romain Grosjean drove another perfect race, changing over to a three-stop strategy and overtaking Force India’s Paul di Resta in the last third of the race.
Behind them, Sergio Perez and Lewis Hamilton were clear winners as well. The Venezuelan has been under fire for his below-par performances in the first three races of the season, but here is where he turned up the heat, literally. He bumped wheels with his team-mate Jenson Button, chased Rosberg off the track, chided Alonso in staying behind him and almost collided with Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton. It was clearly a frantic race for him where he alone accounted for the majority of the action on track. His sixth placed finish was just reward.

Hamilton too had a gainful outing after his race was compromised on Saturday when his rear right tyre gave way. He recovered well enough to finish fifth, again in front of the two McLarens, proving his decision to move to Mercedes right for a fourth race in succession.

Tyre Debate
Pirelli changed their tyre compound strategy by leaving the soft compounds in China and bringing the mediums to Bahrain instead. The move paid off because there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two compounds. Neither was overtly quicker over shorter distances and teams could therefore gamble with strategies. A fine example was that of Ferrari opting to start their drivers on different compounds, although their move backfired when Alonso’s DRS system developed a snag and Felipe Massa suffered the same problem as Lewis, that too twice during the race. Specific to this issue, they will clearly need to look into the structure of their compounds for the tyres appeared to be disintegrating in this desert track’s high temperatures.

Also, unlike Shanghai the FIA got the DRS zones bang on, aiding the overtaking manoeuvre while refraining from over-simplifying it. In the end, it made for a race to remember, with ample action on track as least compared to the first three of this season.

Force India Wonder
Saturday was a good day for the two Force India cars as Paul di Resta and Adrian Sutil qualified fifth and sixth respectively. It raised visions of a podium finish for these drivers, which would only be the second one ever for this team – Giancarlo Fisichella had finished second for them in the Belgian GP in 2009.
But it was not to be, for the Force India cars did not have the pace to challenge either on a two-stop or three-stop strategy – Lotus were definitively quicker on the former, and Mercedes/McLaren/Red Bull would have proven to be quicker on the latter. Additionally Sutil’s race was compromised early on and he finished 12th. But Force India now have 26 points in four races – three more than McLaren – and that is their most promising start to an F1 season ever.

(Chetan Narula is the author of History of Formula One: The Circus comes to India.)